the inventor and the tycoon by edward ball

A tale from the great American West, this popular history unspools a story of passion, wealth, and sinister ingenuity. Set in California during its frontier decades, The Tycoon and the Inventor interweaves Muybridge's quest to unlock the secrets of motion through photography, an obsessive murder plot, and the peculiar partnership of an eccentric inventor and a driven entrepreneur. And between them, the murderer and the railroad mogul launched the age of visual media. Stanford hired Muybridge and his camera to answer that question. His patron was railroad tycoon (and former California governor) Leland Stanford, whose particular obsession was whether four hooves of a running horse ever left the ground at once. Yet the artist and inventor Muybridge was also a murderer who killed coolly and meticulously, and his trial is one of the early instances of a media sensation. He was the first to capture time and play it back for an audience, giving birth to visual media and screen entertainments of all kinds. The strange and oftentimes perplexing relationship between these two. One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures. Written with style and passion by National Book Award-winner Edward Ball, this riveting true-crime tale of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads puts on display the virtues and vices of the great American West. In The Inventor and the Tycoon, Edward Ball adopts a microhistorical approach to tell the stories of two profoundly different men Leland Stanford, a cantankerous, incredibly wealthy railroad tycoon, and Edward Muybridge, a wild, obsessively brilliant artist and inventor. From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.

The inventor and the tycoon by edward ball